a spreading of wings, a bating of breath, a sense of something coming

Blind Flash Fiction

Description: Two or more writers each begin a story with a single sentence. Each writer then covers up this sentence and all writers swap stories. The next writer writes a single blind sentence, supposedly continuing the original writer’s story. All writers continue in this mode: write a sentence, cover, swap — until the page is full. Then, you read the completed stories.

The following is what Ori and myself constructed at a crepe shop at midnight.
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The first day we arrived, we both kicked off our shoes, never to be recovered. That was about the time I stopped talking and looked up. Silly us; we expected so much. No way around it; this was the start of the last hour of my life, marked just so by all that follows. We didn’t really have the time so we decided to track down our favorite friend. Liquor thick like a blanket in the air, and everyone knew it. We broke her nose. A stray kid, dog, cat — fuck if it’s important — appeared out of thin air. It’s okay — we found what we’d been after.
—

It started out the sky was so clear, every moutnain in the whole range was visible, crisp and clean against powder blue. But, before I could really begin, I had to accept the idea that everything was going to, without question, fall apart. “Rage,” a voice slithered up from behind a rock or a tree or nothing at all. Over enthusiastic, I said, “Whoa, Hey! I’m totally into this music!” Pear trees, dry grass, a house off down this broken road made of terra cota — it was all there, blistering in sudden heat. This “time” I kept seeing pour out like honey on an open mouth wasn’t going to last. A rainbow of color, I hit the ground and was dead, just like that.
—

Two pennies — debased bits of metal from a past I wasn’t from — were slapped down on my table without introduction, warning, or explanation. Without the silence, though, it was ridiculously difficult to must the resolve to continue. “A shame it was never going to work out,” that fat asshole in the corner booth was slurring at me, sucking on a fucking bottle of true 80 Proof. Nearby, a tree showed all the signed of a blight; little white spots contrasted bright green leaves. I got up, then, real slow and easy so nobody would notice the handgun in my pocket. Without the glasses, subtle things blurred together and lost poper definition. The explosive, ear-numbing sound happened before I even got the damned thing out of my little secret hiding place. Instead of trying to remember where they were, or quickly searching, they were carelessly and casually dismissed as unimportant. Three sounds all at once and nobody in that place would, later, know the difference: that motherfucker laughing, me screaming all panic and bloody muder, and two useless bits of metal clattering into the pool my blood was making on the cheap-ass linolium flooring.
—

They awoke to a bright morning, squinting into the dawn, afraid to let the light in much further than eyelashes. Sand trapped in a pinched glass cone slowly spilled down into a small pile at the bottom. The sun is often, if not always, unrelenting. Cutting through all this was red-orange light from these flame-shaped bulbs the Cheap ‘N’ Easy sells for two days work. In a near blind daze, they finally approached the day, or perhaps the day had first made it’s own cautious step nearer. As if breath were in them, the already nearby walls of the place really, honestly felt like they were leaning in — getting closer, closer, about to touch one another. Accordingly, a few voices could be heard around the streets, all quiet and soft but distinct in the otherwise even hum of the late morning. Paper white, which isn’t really even white at all, and a crack like an edge of sound being broken in half — then, nothing. It really didn’t take long for the morning to end, as it all was.